@DavidZ there might be a question or two lurking in there (like what types of data those satellites gather), but it could certainly use a rewrite; I have no objections to closing it, but I don't want to end up being the sole arbiter of astro stuff

The United States federal government entered a shutdown on October 1, 2013, suspending services deemed "non-essential" by the Antideficiency Act.
[http://reuters.com/article/2013/09/30/usa-fiscal-courts-idUSL1N0HQ2AK20130930 U.S. federal courts to remain open if government shuts down], Joseph Ax, Reuters, September 30, 2013.
It is the first U.S. federal government shutdown since the shutdown of 1995 and 1996.
The United States Federal Government has shut down on 18 occasions since 1976,
[http://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/oct/01/us-government-shutdown-world-economy-dolla...

I should walk into an airport and yell "I'm Viktor Navorski!". Not every day one can do that :p

1 hour later…

Anonymous

5:39 AM

I wanted my reply to the moderators on my second suspension (by David Z) to be public, so let me paste it here:

Anonymous

> Well, there's obviously nothing rude about that, and I wouldn't feel attacked if someone were to tell me that.

> Especially for the second one, I had noticed that a particular user who will not be named, as that may only cause more trouble for me, stops bugging answers once they're accepted, so it's obviously natural that I requested that.

> This unnamed user should not baselessly troll about Mc Mahon or people who read his books , as this user obviously does not even know the topic he is trolling about!

You seem to be claiming that many things are obvious. And meta response has told you, multiple times, that it isn't. Maybe not in this case, but in others

Anonymous

@ManishEarth I was Criticising. Obviously. Because I was logically stateing that mcmahon's books are not dummies books; they are mathematical, etc. etc., whereas saying "You are arrogaent", "Yet you listed Dilaton, who read Demystified" is obviously an attack.

@DImension10AbhimanyuPS You keep saying that. I don't agree. Neither do the other moderators. A lot of people on this site manage to have strongly held and strongly defended opinions without personalizing the dialog.

@ChrisWhite You're one of the few high rep users who is in chat, exercises the community moderation powers, and understands the system. And probably the only one who is astro-y. So...yeah, sole arbiter :p

user54412

6:07 AM

@ManishEarth lol - there is something to be said for everyone closing questions that aren't in their specialty - for the same reason judges recuse themselves from cases they might have an interest in

@JeffAtwood: ? (Not sure I quite get what you're trying to say here) Not all of the SE Q&As deal with "problems". Stick that label on any science site and you have a homework-help forum. — ManishearthJan 21 at 8:21

but as far as I know, as of now there's no plan for getting things started again. So the shutdown will continue until Congress actively decides to stop it.

user54412

government secrecy in a nutshell: after weeks of pestering the person at JPL who grants visitor access (I was trying to collaborate with someone there), they finally give me a link to the form to fill out... except the form was only accessible from an inside-JPL IP address

They will get your MAC and IP address and then they will send it off to the NSA. The NSA knows every IP and MAC in the world (every computer has a unique combination). They will then send a special intervention team to storm into your place and kill you.
If I were you I'd just throw away my com...

"If i sound pissed you have no idea. Your future is now on the line if you wish to rethink this further. There is already a consequence regardless of your explanation.

Note - i have no interest in email discussion - you need to deliver a code for the paper you submitted NOW that anyone in CCL can use to reproduce ALL the results - can you do this? i need an answer and a code within matter of hours not days... - if you cannot i would have to assume the paper has fraudulent results. If i have to withdraw this I will need to do this by next week."

I gave a brand new post-doc my code to reproduce data and he couldn't. Rather than default to him doing something wrong (which it turns out he didn't), my advisor defaulted to my making things up. It turns out that something is wrong with the cluster we're using

I read questions about things like this (well, vaguely like this, usually not so bad) on Academia and the top or near-top suggestion is always to get a third party involved, like the department head or graduate program adviser, and document everything

The metric expansion of space is the increase of the distance between two distant parts of the universe with time. It is an intrinsic expansion whereby the scale of space itself is changed. That is, a metric expansion is defined by an increase in distance between parts of the universe even without those parts "moving" anywhere. This is not the same as any usual concept of motion, or any kind of expansion of objects "outward" into other "preexisting" space, or any kind of explosion of matter which is commonly experienced on earth.
Metric expansion is a key feature of Big Bang cosmology an...

@DImension10AbhimanyuPS There are lots of different aspects of laboratory safety that could be relevant to experimental physics, for example laser safety, handling strong vacuum, all kinds of chemicals, ...

@DImension10AbhimanyuPS /cc @ChrisWhite Way to take things out of context.

If you knew the previous discussions on Astro.SE, the main thing is that the Phys community doesn't want fragmentation. If Astro remains an amateur site, there is minimal fragmentation between the two sites. If it becomes full on Astro+Astrophysics, then there is some fragmentation which he doesn't want to be part of